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AirTab 15.6″ Portable Display Provides 2x USB-C Inputs (Crowdfunding)

While portable displays have been available as far back as at least 2012, they’ve become more popular in recent years as they can both offer a secondary display to your laptop, or add a larger screen to your smartphone. In the last two years, we’ve already covered BlitzWolf BW-PCM1, T-bao T15A, TAIHE Gemini (which ended up being a failure), Airview, and Desklab among others. But apparently, there’s room for more with the launch of AirTab, a 15.6″ portable touchscreen or non-touch monitor, on Kickstarter that’s already surpassed its $10,000 funding target. AirTab specifications: 15.6″ display with 1920×1080 resolution up to 60 Hz refresh rate; 4ms response time; 256 cd/m2 brightness Touchscreen – Air Touch model only USB – 2x USB-C ports Power Supply – Dimensions – 335 x 245 x 4.9 mm Weight – 500 grams AirTab comes with a foldable magnetic cover that allows the display to be used […]

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ZS1100A IoT Power Meter Supports Sigrok Open-Source Software (Crowdfunding)

A few months ago, I tested Qoitech Otii Arc power meter & DAQ system designed for developers of IoT devices, and fount out it would be incredibly useful to developers of battery-operated devices since it shows voltage and current graphs synchronized with the serial output making it easy to see where software might be optimized. The system can also capture analog and digital signals from the DUT and emulate batteries with user-defined characteristics. But this weekend, I’ve come across a very similar solution with ZS1100A IoT power meter that also happens to be compatible with Sigrok open-source signal analysis software, and the corresponding Pulseview GUI. ZS1100A IoT power meter specifications: Measurements Output Voltage Range – 0 to 6 V programmable in 10 mV steps with +/- 5mV accuracy, Current Measurement Range – -0.5 A to 1.5 A (linear range) with < 0.1 μA resolution,  accuracy of 1% of measured value […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Dune HD RealBox 4K TV Box Runs Android and Linux on Realtek RTD1395 SoC

Realtek RTD1395 processor is designed for 4K HDR TV boxes and set-top boxes. Equipped with a quad-core Cortex-A53 processor and Mali-470 GPU it offers a lower-cost alternative to Realtek RTD1295 and RTD1296 with the same 4K video processing and playback capabilities. So far, we had seen it in TV boxes designed for operators and Banana Pi BPI-M4 single board computer, but Dune HD RealBox 4K TV box is the first RTD1395 consumer device sold directly to end-users. Dune HD RealBox 4K  specifications: SoC – Realtek RTD1395 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with Mali-470MP4 GPU System Memory – 2 GB RAM Storage – 16 GB flash, MicroSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4Kp60 HDR and AV port (composite) Audio – Optional S/PDIF, analog stereo audio via AV port, digital audio via HDMI port; HDMI audio pass-through to AV receiver Video Playback 4Kp60 HDR/HDR10+ with 10-bit H.265 and VP9 profile-2, […]

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GNOME Renders on Arm Mali-G31 Bifrost GPU with Fully Open Source Code

We first wrote about Panfrost open-source Arm Mali GPU driver getting initial support for Mali-G31 Bifrost GPU in late April, when engineers at Collabora managed to run some basic demos. Progress has been fast-paced as the company has now implemented support for all major features of OpenGL ES 2.0 and some features of OpenGL 2.1. That means hardware-based on Arm Mali-G31 GPU such as ODROID Go Advance (used for testing) can run Wayland compositors with zero-copy graphics, including GNOME 3, every scene in glmark2-es2 benchmarks, and some 3D games such as Neverball. All without any binary blobs. The company also claims to support hardware-accelerated video players mpv and Kodi. The way it should work is that while Panfrost driver renders the user interface, Amlogic open-source video decoder developed by BayLibre handles hardware video decoding. All changes are already included in upstream Mesa with no out-of-tree patches required, and Bifrost support […]

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Dialog DA16200 WiFi SoC Promises a Year of Battery Life for Always-Connected IoT Devices

WiFi is omnipresent, and many IoT devices are relying on the wireless standard for connectivity, but as most of you will already know, WiFi suffers from high-power consumption and may not always be suitable for battery-operated devices. There are always battery optimization tricks to use WiFi on battery-powered devices, for example, a solar camera using PIR to only record and transmit video when needed,  or a board optimized to consume as little as possible in deep sleep waking up only when necessary. Those tricks are not applicable to all use cases, so Dialog Semiconductor has launched DA16200 Wi-Fi SoC delivering year plus battery life for always-connected Wi-Fi IoT devices. DA16200 key features and specifications: MCU Core – Arm Cortex M4F @ up to 160 MHz Memory – 512 KB SRAM Storage – 256 kB ROM, 8KB OTP ROM, external flash controller, eMMC, SD host Connectivity 2.4 GHz, 20 MHz channel […]

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MARK AI Robot Kit Aims to Teach AI & Robotics to 12+ Years Old (Crowdfunding)

We’ve written about Kendryte K210 RISC-V AI processor, and Sipeed M1 module several times including in our getting started for Maixduino and GroveAI HAT boards for low-power AI inference such as object recognition or face detection using Arduino and Micropython programming. Shenzhen-based Tinkergen, a STEM Education owned by Seeed Studio, has now leveraged the low-cost processor to design MARK AI robot kit, where MARK stands for Make A Robot Kit, in order to processor an educational AI Robotics platform for children ages 12 years old and more. MARK will ship as a kit with the main parts and components including a chassis, a cover, two wheels, stepper motors, a pan-tilt camera with K210 processor, a 2.4″ LCD display, Grove & Arduino compatible MARKduino interface board, some sensors, and six AA batteries. Tinkergen offers pre-trained model to recognized objects like humans, books, pens, or smartphones, as well as traffic signs, numbers […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Olimex ESP32-S2-Devkit-LiPo WiFi Board Consumes as Little as 2uA in Sleep Mode

When we covered ESP32 powered TTGO T-Watch-2000 smartwatch this week-end, people noted that with a 350 mAh battery, the watch would last about 3.65 days considering a 4mA drain with the screen always off, WiFI and Bluetooth off, and around 65mA when the screen is on good for about 5 hours of continuous use without Bluetooth nor WiFi. But it’s possible to make a much more-efficient ESP32-S2 Wifi board, as demonstrated by Olimex with their upcoming ESP32-32-Devkit-LiPo based on ESP32-S2-Saola-1 with circuitry to support LiPo batteries. They designed the board with an ultra-low-power power supply circuit which makes current consumption during sleep only 6uA, 4 of which are due to the battery measurement resistor divider, meaning the board should consume only 2uA in sleep mode or about 10 times less than other ESP32 Olimex boards. When reviewed Qoitech Otii power measurement & DAQ tool, we also noted power consumption could […]

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BashTop is a Linux Resource Monitor for the Terminal

Neil Amstrong of BayLibre recently added ODROID-C4 support to Armbian,  fired up Rosetta@Home on the Amlogic S905X3 SBC, and took a  screenshot of some kind of advanced htop program showing the Rosetta@Home and other processes running. And… Rosetta@Home starting ! pic.twitter.com/w10hjwppLR — Neil Armstrong @superna9999@social.linux.pizza (@Superna9999) April 27, 2020 The program used happens to be BashTop a recently released Linux resource monitor written in Bash and running in a terminal. Installing the script and running it is super easy:

I tried it in an AMD Ryzen 7 laptop running Ubuntu 18.04. You’ll need at least a 80×25 terminal window, but it looks much better in full screen. It shows CPU use in graphical and text forms, memory and storage usage, a list of processes, as well as network usage both in graphical and text forms. You can also select each individual process to get more information or kill it. […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC